A Rollercoaster of Highs & Lows is definitely the best description of the weekend... I think that can be echoed by soooo many teams.
I think I pointed out to no fewer than 10 people how impressed I was that every time I walked by 148's pit (and that was a lot since I ended up in charge of doing all the "robot photos" for our scouting) the only people ever touching the robot (in fact very often the only people IN the pit) were students.
We unfortunately had some major travel hiccups which meant our students didn't get to the venue until 7pm... with all we had to do, we chose to work with the 5 of us we had (adults) to get things going... as soon as the kids walked in, we switched and walked out. We then had the unfortunate episode that the rest of our adults (chaperones & mentors) plane got grounded, and for 4 hours on Thurs morning we had all the kids, 3 chaperones and 5 mentors, and that was it... in a way, it was wonderful... the kids really HAD to do everything. I felt like we were glimpsing what the Robowranglers always do.
Then as I wandered to every single pit to take robot photos, I began to take more and more notice of who was working on the robots. In the lower numbers, it was often mentors & students hand in hand... but as I climbed in numbers, the mentors seemed to take over... odd since so many of these seem to be the teams complaining about the "beautiful mentor designed robots". Sure there were several pits where the students were still very involved, but it was noticeable, as I tried to go in team order.
I was completely in shock to see 148 out so soon. Our team elected to take the team photo at 1pm, I thought for sure I would get to see a few 148 eliminations matches... but one of our kids turned as we were leaving the stage, upon seeing 234 said... OMG, isnt that one of the Robowranglers partners?!? We were kind of in shock too...
And I laughed at the Will.i.am being free vs Karthik for $10... This can obviously be taken two ways... the first that our Real FIRST Rock-Stars cost money to see, while anyone at all can go see Will.i.am
The second of course being that teams should have more access to FIRST Rock-Stars... though honestly, if Karthik could keep his presentation clean just one of these years, they might just film it and put it up online for everyone to see ;-)
Not sure which way you meant John, but I would gladly pay $10 to see Karthik, not sure I would say the same for Will.i.am (even though his support is welcomed!).
Overall I agree... oddly I felt very neutral walking out of championships this year. There were some things that had me crazy frustrated... but there were some really great things too...